The Value Of Linking Out: $56m Per Year
Further to my post the other day about SEO Blackholes, here's an interesting study regarding the value of linking out.
The common wisdom is that linking out will result in the following:
- People will not link back to your site
- A page that sends people away has low engagement
- It boosts the completion at your expense
However, it appears that top news site in terms of session use, two months running, is DrudgeReport, a site that does nothing but send people away. I believe Google got rather popular for doing much the same thing :)
And look at the numbers:
"Page view statistics
500 million page views monthly
1.95 billion ad impressions monthly
12 million unique visitors monthly
1.75 million daily unique visitors (weekday)
1 million daily unique visitors (weekend day)Assuming 60% sell-through at $4 CPM… that’s $56 million annual revenue.
One guy. Linking."
If you provide something people really want, they'll keep coming back.
Comments
This is a lesson which Yahoo may still have yet to learn.
Too true. They sold Yahoo! Buzz as get your site featured on the Yahoo! homepage and then usually (99%+ of the time) reserve that spot for Yahoo!'s own content always.
"Page view statistics
500 million page views monthly
1.95 billion ad impressions monthly
12 million unique visitors monthly
1.75 million daily unique visitors (weekday)
1 million daily unique visitors (weekend day)"
Those numbers don't add up. 1.75M unique visitors a weekday, at 20 weekdays a month is alone more than 12 M visitors monthly.
Impressive stuff nonetheless, which reminds me of the post Aaron keeps linking to about Paris Hilton talking about other folks and being succesful that way.
guess I'm a bit late here: I just wanted to mention that you may well have 1000 unique visitors on every single day of the month and still have only a total of 1000 unique visitors a month if you have the same 1000 visitors coming back every day.
Which also depends on how your web analytics tool computes unique visitors...
And yet this post mentions the DrudgeReport without linking :)
Fair point, however the post is about the study, as opposed to DrugeReport itself :)
Regardless of the numbers, The Drudge Report gets a lot of attention; Washington and politicians are forced to deal with him delicately, though it appears he's something of a recluse. He's linked to "regular" sites lately, sometimes causing servers to go down.
That said, whatever Mr. Drudge gets out of his website, it's essentially a one-page site (he does archive his home page) filled with links. And he can do that, given that he's not got a lot of other content and he's not selling a service or product. Of course, part of the benefit of reading (or scanning) The Drudge Report is that it gives you a quick take on what's going on — so it hurts little in terms of time to give it a quick view.
Ah, I just read the article:
Yes, but as I said, his home page is a quick scan, and we're not there to buy anything. He does have a very few ads, but I'll bet his rate card is something to behold due to the size of his viewership.
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